


Matador Fury: Sparks Of Distant Flares

by RoryKurago



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Kaiju (Pacific Rim), Mexico, Military Backstory, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Panama Shatterdome, Prison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-10-10 06:36:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20523572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: They were eighteen when they met in Basic. Javi was the one with the ideas, but it took him and Guille both to carry them through. They were always going to rise and fall together.





	Matador Fury: Sparks Of Distant Flares

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeta'd. Started in 2014. Travis Beacham says Matador Fury is piloted by "convicts but not necessarily criminals". How does that happen?
> 
> Just for a flipped perspective, everything italicised is other-than-Spanish, hence the Spanish punctuation in dialogue. 
> 
> Javi and Guille are inspired by Hector and Charlie from 'The Unit', and a post I made about an sort-of AU with them in a tumblr post.

They were eighteen when they met in Basic Training. Different sides of México D.F. Different backgrounds. They’d aged differently, Guille thought, these sons of a glass merchant and of a torero.

So Javi looked older. Maybe younger when he smiled.

Or maybe it was their mothers in them that formed them so differently: Javi’s was an artist. Guille’s made cafeteria salad.

Javi mouthed off to the sergeant straight off the bus and took a beating before sunset on Day One.

\- -

The platoon went around in the dark saying what they’d want to do if they weren’t here. Ortega said bartending. Valdes said graphic design school.

Chamorro said stripping, and got the laugh he wanted.

Javi said he wanted a hacienda down south where he’d farm alpacas and agave. Guille didn’t know him well enough to decide if he was kidding.

“Hey, Guille, ¿what would you be?” said Chamorro.

“Dead,” said Guille, and rolled over to go to sleep. If he’d followed his father’s plan, if he’d let his Uncle rule him… He’d already let the family down by enlisting, but somebody had to pay the rent.

\- -

Javi caught a lot of shit for being black. Guille caught a lot of shit for being short and for sounding like a hick even when he was from the D.F.

It didn’t make him more sympathetic. Everyone had their own baggage to carry.

\- -

Guille didn’t really want to be in the Army, but he was good at it. It was good to him. A guaranteed pay check, clean water, hot food, a place to sleep? All good.

Javi was more interested in a leg-up into the non-com ranks and the attached ticket out of the family compound where everyone slept on top of each other, ventilated by night breezes through the tarpaulin over the crumbled corner of the room.

The Army was where Guille didn’t have to think about how he would never be a torero just like his father would never be a matador. It was where he could save enough money to send back for Abuelo to go to a private clinic instead of waiting for hours in a room that stank of resignation.

For Javi, it was where he stole the non-coms’ bootblack and put it on their towels so they showed up ahead of schedule black-streaked and foaming at the mouth, ready to beast every single cadet.

Guille hated him.

\- -

The NCOs beasted them individually, and then collectively when no one owned up. They hadn’t been able to remove the bootblack entirely and greasy polish clung to several lips in dead-to-rights Hitler moustaches. The cadets couldn’t contain their laughter even while they puked their way through breakfast and into lunch.

Several cadets clapped Javi on the shoulder as they finally dragged themselves to the showers.

\- -

Guille’s father had died when Guille was fourteen because he was an 'artist'; because he’d refused to accept that, as good a torero as he was, he would never be good enough. The horn took him through the femoral artery. He bled out onto the sand in under twenty seconds flat. This instilled in the boy a brutal practicality about the nature of the world.

The next time they got liberty, Guille told every girl in the bar that Javi had some kind of tropical VD and, because of his sweet face, they believed him.

\- -

Javi called Guille a racist piece of shit and shoved him so hard he hit the mat and rolled. Hand-to-hand training took a wet turn.

\- -

They sat on opposite ends of the bench outside the sergeant’s office. Guille’s head already thumped with the black eye rising in his eye socket. Javi poked experimentally at a puffy laceration on his jaw.

“You know,” Guille said at last, tired of wasting energy on this, “I only said that stuff to the girls because you got us all thrashed for that boot polish travesura.”

Javi’s head ratcheted toward him like an automaton and he stared as if Guille had spoken Kalahari Bushman. Then he roared with laughter. “Güey, I only did that ‘cause you need to smile more. ¡Damn!”

It might have been the adrenaline crash or the sheer exhaustion, but Guille smiled too, and then outright laughed.

“Ah, shit, hermano,” Javi said, wiping away a tear, “¡we’re gonna go ‘round in circles! Hey, a couple more shiners like that and you’re gonna be as handsome as me.”

\- -

Additional duties for a week. And the sergeant moved beds around so Guille and Javi shared a bunk, and set them a list of cleaning to do.

They scrubbed the bathroom block ceiling to drains with toothbrushes and Comet.

Javi grinned as he flicked hair off his brush into the waiting garbage bag. “My mother would be thrilled. She’s never seen me be so clean.”

Guille kept his head down.

\- -

Javi snored. Guille contemplated the administrative punishment for premeditated murder and bought a set of earplugs instead.

\- -

The regulation boots pinched. After ten miles, Guille’s feet bled.

Javi winced when Guille peeled his boots off that night. Grey skin spread like moth wings. Unspeaking, Javi fetched a med kit and started showing Guille out to clean out the blisters without screaming at the chafe of cotton. 

Guille told him not to bother. Affronted, Javi got up and left. When he was gone, Guille tried to mimic what he’d done and finish dressing the wounds. It was a poor job.

\- -

Javi’s father got sick in May. Guille didn’t want to go with him to the hospital but they were rostered for liberty the same afternoon, and once the taxi arrived at Intake, it seemed rude to ditch Javi. They wore the same patch; ate the same cardboard food; slogged through the same crap on ruck marches.

He followed Javi to the ward and nodded to a spare man too long for his bed. Javi introduced him as Guillermo; no rank, no descriptor. An improbably regal woman stood from the visitor’s chair looking like she’d fallen out of a tarot card and gotten stuck on the way to the next dimension. Javi greeted her as mother and passed her hand to Guille to shake. She embraced him instead.

Uncharacteristically, Javi didn’t say a word about Guille tearing up at the hug, but he treated Guille to a beer at a sports bar across the road after they left.

\- -

“¿Did you ever want to be anything else before this?” Guille asked Javi in a rare bout of curiosity.

They stood up to their waists in brackish water holding their rifles over their heads. Around them, the rest of the platoon carried on their own conversations.

Javi grinned. “Nah, güey. This is it. ¿You see any better options lyin’ around?”

“Fuckin’ loads,” said Chamorro. “Football star. Dentist.”

“Septic tank inspector,” offered Valdes.

The section chuckled and the NCOs threw another bucket of foul black water over them.

\- -

Basic passed. Javi didn’t. They were posted to the same unit, along with Valdes and Chamorro.

Guille’s mother came to see the Passing Out parade. More reservedly than Javi’s mother, she kissed Javi perfunctorily on both cheeks and regarded him coolly. When was Guille coming home to see the family, she asked almost before she’d even let go of Javi.

\- -

The section hit the bar to do their own send-off. This time Javi told all the girls in the bar that Guille had a tropical VD. He laughed his ass off all the way back to base and he was still running long after Guille tired of chasing him.

\- -

It was zero-dark-twenty and the whole platoon was cold, wet, and miserable. Most had managed to drop off and get a little shut-eye, but Guille had drawn the short straw for this exercise:

He lay with eyes out of their trench watching for movement along the raised road two hundred feet away.

Javi was the kind of man who sang to lift his spirits, and raise those of others around him. This time he was singing Christmas carols.

“Javi,” Guille called back to him. “Shut the hell up and go to sleep.”

\- -

Someone else in the section was in charge of brewing morning coffee before they headed back to base. The smell of it burning woke Guille up before it was time. He came awake with the temper of a cut snake. His mouth opened to rip them a new one but Javi beat him to it:

“¡Hey, Volcán, leave some coffee in those ashes, ey!”

That was it for Valdes. He was slapped with Volcán—volcano. His cooking only had two modes: raw or chargrilled.

\- -

Conversation returned to the outside world as they ground their way through cook-house chow.

“¿What about you, Javi?” said one of the other men in the platoon. “¿What would you be doing if you weren’t here?”

“Studied info tech and international relations a bit before I changed my mind and enlisted,” Javi said casually. “Might still go NGO, or UN, or something after this.”

“Nah, güey,” said another man, “go private sector. Security and rapid response, all that Soldier of Fortune shit. That’s where the money is.” The table fell to discussing that. Guille, meanwhile, reconsidered Javi.

Javi, for his part, looked to be reconsidering mercenary work.

\- -

The exercise was re-routed to deal with a bandit group that had been preying on a nearby bridge of late. Baiting them into an attack proved harder than anticipated. The platoon stayed dug in for two weeks.

They were only getting three hours of decent sleep as it was. Guille curled up more tightly around his rifle and tried to relax himself to sleep.

The night fought him. Insects trilled, or rather, screamed. Ortega sniffled with a spring cold. Tiny rocks dug into Guille like they were trying to burrow under his skin. He catalogued all of this as if he were tallying the house accounts for his mother.

The sum total as it presented itself was this: shit, mijo, if you make it through this, you’re going to have gunpowder in your veins for life.

He kicked Javi awake to share this revelation. Javi slept better than the rest of them; he had the magical gift of falling asleep on whatever he rested his head on. His mood was substantially better than the mean and when Guille explained his zero-three-twenty philosophy, Javi actually laughed.

“Well, damn," he said. “Now we’re committed to this bullshit for life.”

Guille sighed. He hadn’t thought it through that far. The idea of this for the next thirty years… He shook his head when Javi offered him a cigarette.

“¿Since when do you smoke, anyway, pendejo?”

Javi grinned, his teeth white in the dark. “Since there’s sweet Mary fuck all else to do while we wait for these hijos de puta. But since some pinche philosopher woke me up, how about I teach you one of my mother’s favourite songs.”

He taught Guille the words to María Magna. Guille didn’t like that one any more than the rest.

\- -

Guille ducked as bullets zinged overhead into the embankment. Huffing, he squeezed his eyes shut, counted to three, and then popped up to return fire. Rocks splintered in the volley he drew.

Javi swiped his sleeve against his cheek to blot a cut from shrapnel that had winged him and slotted a new magazine into his rifle.

Guille bobbed down cursing. He was dry and he’d used his second spare magazine the day before.

Grim-faced, Javi tapped Guille’s arm with his own second spare. “Keep this up and you’ll make Cabo.” It wasn’t a compliment. “I need a better angle on the assholes.”

On three, they rose up together and ran for closer cover.

\- -

Guille was decorated for conspicuous valour and given a second red stripe. Javi wasn’t. He didn’t look sour about it, exactly, but his cool expression now matched that of Guille’s mother.

\- -

In December of 2006, when they were twenty years of age, El Presidente sent six thousand troops into Michoacán to quell the drug violence there. Guille smelled civil war brewing in the near distance like coffee burning on a campfire, and hit the bunkhouse early. He didn’t know if he was stocking up on sleep for the last twenty-mile ruck march, or pre-empting three years of poor sleep in worse conditions.

\- -

“_Smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em_,” Guille heard the sergeant say from the far end of the line. He said it in English, but from Javi’s soft whicker of laughter at Guille’s side, he understood at least as much as Guille. In ten minutes, they were due to go outside the wire escorting a convoy of supplies forward to a smaller operating station. It had been harried near non-stop for the last thirty-six hours.

Vaguely, Guille wondered how many more years his psyche would take not knowing if he’d be alive to eat dinner. He already didn’t find the thought disturbing, which was itself concerning.

\- -

Javi's helmet caught a groove deep enough to stick a matchstick into during the firefight. The bullet pinged right off his temple. Naturally he showed everyone later, and then got into a scrap with Piedra just before he and Guille were due to go on watch.

He still snored, but Guille was getting used to ignoring it.

\- -

Between them, the platoon took some bad hits during a local hearts-and-minds visit, to borrow the American phrasing. Chamorro only took a glancing shot to the leg – lots of blood but nothing fatal – but Enriqué took it in the neck, just under the chinstrap.

Half the fight getting his body back to cover was that Chamorro went down beside him and wouldn’t let go while the sergeant and the medic tried to pull them both back to cover.

Guille sat quietly beside Javi in the truck back to camp, Enriqué’s blood drying on his pants. For once, Javi was quiet. He had his helmet in his lap, fingers on the groove.

\- -

“Well,” said Javi, watching narrow-eyed across the compound as a doctor emerged from Medical to strip off his gloves and smoke a cigarette. "That’s it for Kiqué. ¿Who else can deal cards?” He took another deep pull on his own cigarette, and then passed it to Guille.

“Fuck cards,” Guille muttered, taking the cigarette and giving in to the urge to swear for once. “I’m so fucking done with this shit.”

\- -

Guille was on the verge of falling asleep when Javi nudged him with the butt of his rifle. He grumbled awake, prepared to slap some sense into his trench-mate.

Javi’s eyes were catching the sparks of distant flares over the ridge above their camp. His leg was warm against Guille’s where they slumped against the embankment. “Hermano,” he murmured, “I had the best idea for what to do when we get out of here.”

\- -

They didn’t get back to the D.F. in time for Enriqué’s funeral. Still, they paid their respects in full uniform on their next off-rotation to his family, his fiancée, his dogs. One of them was a stupid little yappy thing, but the other dog was a curly white hound with a jaunty tail and black, black eyes.

“I love dogs,” Javi told the fiancée, bending to pet it.

Guille raised his eyebrows. He hadn’t even known Javi liked animals. Maybe the alpaca farm hadn’t been a joke.

Javi spent a lot of time talking to the fiancée on the back steps, the dog between them. Guille left them to it. He’d never seen Javi cry before.

\- -

The next five months were rough, then dead, then rough again. Neither of them renewed their contracts with the army when their term came up.

\- -

Javi immediately got a tattoo of the Virgin Mary on his throat that snaked up over his collar. He said he’d been thinking about it since shortly after he enlisted. It didn’t show up much against his dark skin, but he liked knowing it was there.

He thought it looked cool. Guille thought it made him look like a punk.

\- - 

It wasn’t that they did anything illegal. Nothing criminal. A few things bordered the line, but they agreed: too many people had gone down that road. They could each name friends on both hands. People went down too far, too quickly. They absolutely did not want to get tangled up in any of that shit.

\- -

Through gossip and bywords, Guille got wind that one of his cousins had been taking it on himself to light-finger what Guille sent back for Abuelo.

Guille didn’t need his mother’s carefully worded phonecall to nudge him into doing something about it. You didn’t feed on family.

Javi went with him for the visit. Carlos sat them down with beers, and potato chips, and had his old lady bring them the gear he’d just bought to show off. They politely followed him around the house for an inspection of his newly-refurbished ride. Nodded to Carlito’s friends lounging on old sofas and bean bags in the shade of the carport.

Then they sent Paula back inside.

So maybe they taught the lesson harshly, and Paula was threatening to call the cops. All those ‘friends’ had jumped the fence and scarpered as soon as they got knocked back the first time. But Carlito would never do it again.

\- -

Even with theft out of the picture, medical costs kept rising, and living outside the Great Government Umbrella wasn’t cheap. Guille and Javi sat at their rickety kitchen table with a bottle of tequila and their month’s accounts, and revisited Javi’s great idea.

Guille took another shot. “Screw it. If we’re gonna do this, let’s do it right.”

Javi refilled Guille’s glass and raised his own. “_Amen_, bajito.”

\- -

They knew weapons. They knew security systems, and protocols, and people. Private security made bank.

Occasionally it also put them in line with the wrong people, but it paid. And they had each other’s backs. Always.

\- -

Chamorro was knifed in the street on deployment to a town no one could name. Javi and Guille attended his funeral in unmarked black suits.

Seeing their friends there in dress uniform didn’t make Guille feel hollow like he might have expected. Maybe the money was just too good.

Chamorro didn’t have a fiancée, so Javi chatted to his cousin. Chamorro had a couple of cousins. It made Guille feel predatory to hit on them at a funeral, so he didn’t.

Still, one of them found him at a nearby bar later, her mourning clothes swapped for jeans and a dull-coloured top.

“Your buddy took off with my cousin,” she told him after a few drinks. “You better take me wherever they went, so I can see she’s all right.”

It wasn’t predatory if they weren’t at the funeral any more, right? It still felt like picking at the dead.

Guille finished his beer before Nora got bored, but slowly.

\- -

It wasn’t like they set out to make a name for themselves. It just happened. A two-man team that could walk through walls and see through steel? Gold, in this industry. They rose up from nothing in a matter of months. Never saw one without the other. Quick, competent, and bull-fighter crazy.

“_Precise_,” Guille corrected a drunk foreigner trying to goad them into a fight at a fancy hotel bar. He was detachedly pleased that his English had come along so well under Javi’s guidance.

The white guy cocked his head. “_And th— What?_”

“Torreros. _They’re not crazy. They’re precise._”

The gringo grimaced and slapped the counter for another drink. He had recently come into some money and was trying to spend it before its owner came calling. “_Johnny Blue_,” he slurred to the bartender. Then to Guille: “_Bean-fucker, I don’t give a shit what woo-woo bullshit you spics tell yourself about bull-fighters. It’s a bullshit sport for bullshit people._”

A gun tapped the back of the white man’s head genteelly and then pulled back out of grabbing range. The man froze.

“_You should give a shit what people say,_” said Javi pleasantly in English. “_Señor Aguirre, for example, says he hopes you have enjoyed his hospitality. You’ll now be returning his money to him._”

Guille toasted Javi, drank half the foreigner’s Johnny Walker, and then passed the glass to his brother-in-arms.

If you did happen to see only one of them, it was because the other was behind you.

\- -

Their reputation preceded them into a meeting set up by a friend of Javi’s. Santiago’s ‘friends’ were determined to work with them, los Hermanos Matadores.

Javi snorted into his drink. Guille ignored that and shook Santiago’s hand.

“We’d be pleased to join the team.”

\- -

Nora cautioned Guille. It wasn’t that she knew anything about the business, but she wanted him whole, she said. He had to take her shopping for an engagement ring and he was going to struggle doing it on crutches, or from a hospital bed.

Javi howled with laughter—not at her fears over the things she’d heard along the grapevine about these people, but for for the easier joke:

“You’re pushing your luck if you think you’re going to get a proposal out of this three-toed sloth motherfucker. He won’t think about it without three years lead and bombs going off around him. Marry me instead.”

“¡Don’t even joke about bombs!” Nora complained. “I hate hearing the shit you drag him into.”

“We drag each other,” Guille said, stung by the injustice, but she was arguing with Javi about riding an alpaca down the aisle and they didn’t hear.

\- -

The money was the best they’d ever made. They almost didn’t mind the occasional colleague who stood the hairs on the backs of their necks straight up.

Or Javi didn’t. Guille had to be seduced into it. Johnny Walker and his friends went some way to helping. Being able to move Abuelo into a dedicated room at a private care facility and his family into a safer area went the rest of it. His mother and uncle didn’t call so much when they thought they were getting everything the family was owed. Meanwhile, Javi bought his own mother a copy of his life insurance policy and his father a granite headstone.

“I’m sorry, hermano,” Guille said, putting an arm around Javi’s shoulders.

“He was ready to go.” Javi tucked his hands into the pockets of his unmarked black suit and for once was quiet, frowning down at the stone.

\- -

As a compromise for not proposing, Guille got a cross tattooed on his shoulderblade with Nora’s name written around it.

“It looks like I died and you’re mourning me,” she complained.

Guille hadn’t thought about it that way. Still she kissed him deeply for the gesture.

Javi slapped him on the back to break it up and, just to be an ass, placed the hit directly on the wound. He cackled as Guille chased him around their new, larger, apartment.

\- -

The work they did was never theft. They were told it was ‘retrieval’: go into the facility, retrieve some data files on a drive the client gave them, and get out of the game altogether.

If the regular work was the best money they’d ever made, this would set them up for life. Guille could buy the house on a hill that he wanted and set it up like a palace; Javi could get his alpacas. Horses, too. (Guill still wasn’t sure about that bit, but Javi kept telling him it was like riding a really smart bike and that he’d love it once he’d learned how.)

They looked at the brief from every angle. The government was drafting a new bill that would put pressure on certain aspects of the client’s business; the client just wanted to know what those were so he could prepare for them. A little light corporate espionage. Border-line.

It seemed safe. And it was so much money.

It was a government facility. It hadn’t been a two-man job, and the client had found his own bodies to fill out the roster. These were private contractors—career, like Guill and Javi. The Hermanos had never seen them before, but they seemed legit. It was routine to review the brief, plot the op, saddle up, and execute.

Routine, right up until the new guys flipped on them.

In the interrogation room, they figured out that it was defence intel regarding overseas operations and the client had fucked them.

\- -

Guille sat on a bench in a badly-fitting suit. For the first time in years, he missed the uniform. When they called his name, he couldn’t help but be ashamed.

He’d been there. He’d been caught. He’d been taken in so easily by men he should have known not to trust.

He was ashamed to be taking Javi down with him.

Javi stood tall and straight in the court room when Guille was led in to join him. He looked sideways and gave the very slightest of crinkling of his eye: a smile. For Javi, that was practically paralysis. But he’d made his point: nobody was taking anybody else down.

At the judge’s command, they sat with backs straighter even than in Basic. Javi’s face turned grim under her severe look, but in his eyes Guille could see the sparks of distant flares.

Javi was here because he had chosen to be. They had always been destined to rise and fall together.

\- -

She hit them for treason. Imprisonment. Segregation. After eight years of living in the same sunlight, breathing the same air, it felt like losing a limb.

The interrogators didn’t care, because these were traitors, and it was just leverage to them. But they did add a note to the file of each: the only way to motivate one was to threaten the other.

\- -

Nora wasn’t allowed to visit. Once a month, or maybe less, the guards let a postcard through.

When she sent them one from the butterfly sanctuary of Michoacán, Guille stopped reading them. She’d drawn a little house under the trees, the way he used to describe his idyll when she and Javi got enough alcohol into him.

He remembered Michoacán differently. More to the point, there was never going to be an Out from this hole. What was the point of dreaming of a life he would never have?

\- -

Javi sang when he was bored. The guards beat him until he shut up.

When his lips healed, he sang again.

\- -

The guard who read the message that Abuelo had died grinned as he did so.

Guille blinked slowly at the opposite wall. No one had sent money. No one had been able to do better than a public clinic.

It hadn't been the sickness that killed Abuelo: it had been the waiting.

He expected Javi to be silent out of respect for that day. That one day.

And Javi was—for a while. But when he started singing again, it was louder than ever.

Guille wanted to be furious. He wanted to kick the wall, break the bars, smash something. He couldn’t make himself get up off the floor.

He couldn’t lift even his tongue from the bed of his mouth to say, ‘callate’. He dug a thumbnail into his palm, and then the other one. Skin burst. Blood welled. It didn’t help the pressure between his ears but it seemed to have broken the seal holding everything inside him. For this first time in years, tears flowed down his cheeks.

Crying in silence, he listened to Javi singing and at last the words filtered through. Javi wasn’t respectful in silence; he was respectful through song, and the songs he sang – _Amazing Grace, May The Road Rise To Meet You_ – were the ones he had sung, joylessly, when someone bought the farm in the field. He’d sung them for Enriqué, and Chamorro.

Javi had met Abuelo. Had liked him.

Guille wanted to rage. He stayed sat and sang the words he knew on the next verse instead.

\- -

He heard his uncle died a short while after that, mixed up with the wrong people trying to make up the money Guille wasn’t sending any more.

Even the guard who gloated over Abuelo’s death seemed to have gotten sick of the game. He let Guille have the funeral program without a fight.

If there was a letter from his mother around the same time, Guille never saw it.  
\- -

A year after he stopped reading Nora’s postcards, Trespasser hit San Francisco. It didn’t matter much to Guille and Javi. They were two years into a life sentence: shitty food, cardboard mattresses, daylight one hour a day. Maybe if a sea monster stepped on the prison, it’d make more of an impact.

Not that conditions were any worse than anything they’d lived through on a mission—but they were, because they had to be endured alone.

For good behaviour, several months after San Francisco was nuked off the map and Wednesday’s second vegetable changed from corn to peas, Javi and Guille moved into ISO cells next door to each other. They still only saw each other face to face for an hour a week (if they behaved, otherwise yard time was staggered and the didn’t set eyes on each other for a fortnight). But at least Guille could hear Javi singing those cheesy-as-hell songs his tías had taught him through the drain running under their cells.

Sometimes he sang hymns as well. Guille would never admit that after a while (after two years of not hearing them), they were actually sort of comforting. He had never really believed, but Javi did. That kind of faith had some wash-over.

\- -

Nora started writing again—but letters. She was back in México from her travels, and her letters were about his family, the situation. Kaiju and Kaiju Blue, air pollution, alterations to the Pacific biome.

Very little about herself. Maybe she was married. Maybe she had kids.

Guille didn’t know. He scanned the letters briefly and then had them passed to Javi, who had always cared more than Guille. Javi was the one who told him Nora had taken up Marine Conservation and Biology; Guille had missed that line.

\- -

The guards had taken to requesting songs they wanted to hear from Javi when the third kaiju hit Cabo San Lucas.

“Shit,” drawled Javi across the hall, out of sight behind his steel door. “Guess the world really is ending. Maybe we oughta start working out again, ¿eh güey?”

In truth they’d kept at it, but listlessly, mainly because there was nothing else to do. Twenty-five to life wasn’t much incentive to stay in shape. But now there was a real chance the world was going to hell. They might have to run. (They might get a chance to.)

Javi took to singing faster songs twice a day, and his grunts suggested he was working out in time to his own tempo. Grudgingly, after a week, Guille did as well.

\- -

Javi also started to pray again.

They were still locked up in their little cells, but they hadn’t been punished by staggering their exercise hour in four months. When Guille asked, he was permitted to attend Chapel service. They weren’t permitted to sit next to each other, of course, but it was an extra hour of visual contact a week. (Another day assured that their interrogators hadn’t thought up a new torture session to get information the Hermanos didn’t have, and that tomorrow when one set foot into the yard, it wasn’t going to be empty except for himself.) For that alone, it was priceless.

One of the guards had become friendly with Guille talking about the topography of the area Guille had always vaguely imagined he might choose to build his house.

It had begun as another form of subtle cruelty: describing the scenery Guille was never going to see again. That guard read Nora’s postcards out when Guille received them; sometimes even when he didn’t want to hear them. But over the years, Muñoz had grown homesick and his chatter now was more reminiscence than PsyOps. He liked talking about the light on the hills. The smell of rain hitting the dirt. The women in the cantinas with their long lashes and quick laughter. The summer colours when the sun set late and sundown took hours.

“Jesú Cristo, but you’re a poet,” Javi drawled. “¿Why don’t you write a poem and see if the local rag will publish it?”

Muñoz slapped Javi’s door and stalked away. As a kindness to the one of them he did like, though, he brought the newspaper when he came back and let Guille read it. Probably, Guille suspected, as a specific fuck-you to Javi.

He ignored Javi’s wheedling attempt to convince Muñoz that he’d spoken in earnest and intended a compliment. The front page was taken up by coverage of the Americans’ new project. ‘_Jaeger_’. Wasn’t that something you bombed? Or something you put in a bomb? Weaksauce bomb. Crazy gringos.

\- -

Javi started teaching Guille the words to Feliz Navidad through the grille. Guille’s complaints fell on deaf ears, despite good, valid points that Christmas didn’t come to convicts and that if Javi didn’t shut up, he was going to get them both pelted with coal by Black Pete. (Or _Krampus_, or the guards, of whoever was paying enough attention to say, hey, you locos, you pinche pendejo army-boys got yourselves all tangled up in a whole lot of stupid and now you’re doing Life for a mistake: you don’t deserve Christmas.)

He could hear the shrug in Javi’s voice as Javi changed the subject and instead spoke of the pastorelas he saw as a kid, and the terrible rosca his mama insisted on making every year, even through it was almost inedible.

As far as Guille knew, no one had ever written to Javi. It wasn’t why he gave Javi Nora’s letters. Officially, she addressed them to both men now that she’d figured out Guille wasn’t reading them.

\- -

Guille was right: there really wasn’t any Christmas. But they were given an extra hour in the yard on La Noche Buena, allowed to attend a late mass in the prison chapel, and permitted to eat their meals together until Reyes Magos.

Javi sang Feliz Navidad just to get on Guille’s nerves (or to make him smile), but he didn’t comment when Guille joined in. The guards joining in brought a grin, though.

Outside, the world might have been descending into hell, but their world was two concrete rooms, a couple of hundred metres of corridor, a messhall with metal seats and tables bolted down, a dirt exercise yard not big enough to run a hundred-metre sprint, and the heartbeat of their fellow Hermano.

A sphere, a rhythm, they knew so well that even with two feet of concrete between them, they could sit with their backs to the wall and know the other was doing the same.

What difference did sea monsters a thousand miles away make? Their bubble was absolute and inviolable. They would never have more than an hour of sunlight a day. They would never wear clothes that weren’t prison-grey jumpsuits, or eat a meal that someone else didn’t cook. They would never walk free in the mountains to a house Guille owned after a day running Javi’s damn alpacas.

This was their world. What difference did a war in another one make?

\- -

They had Feliz Navidad perfectly timed into a canon-round when a man they’d never seen before summoned them into a room (together) and informed them that the Defence Department had a proposition for them.

Guille remembered men like this. Their fingernails were clean and their breath smelled of blood and Listerine.

Javi propped his cuffed hands on the table. “All right, Señor Hairslick. You have our attention. Talk.”

The suit laid papers on the table in neat lines. His breath did indeed smell like Listerine. The papers said that it was February 2016 and the United Nations’ _Pan Pacific Defense Corps_ had officially opened its doors to candidates for pilots. ‘_Rangers_’. The catch was: they needed two.

Two pilots who knew and trusted each other better than themselves.

After four years of incarceration, interrogation, ‘enhanced’ interrogation, and presumably a whole lot of investigation on the outside, the Defense Department had finally concluded that Javi and Guille had just gotten greedy and stupid—wrong place, wrong time, wrong company. They haven’t been absolved of treason.

“Yet,” Javi stressed, eyeing the paper. He sat back, mirroring Guille’s position, and folded his hands in his lap. Unconsciously, they still sat themselves in the same way, same angles, same tilt of the head.

“Because you need leverage,” Guille said.

“You need something to press us with if we decide not to co-operate,” Javi said.

The suit scoffed. “We don’t need anything from you, Señores. The whole world wants to be a _Jaeger_ pilot.”

“But you came down to our little hole in the wall,” Javi said sweetly, with a bright, savage light in his eye, “and asked us specifically. So either this is so dangerous that anyone who tries is gonna die, or we’ve got something special.”

The suit considered, and then decided to be the most honest Guille had ever heard a government official. “Both.” Sitting down, he laid out the rest of the paperwork from his briefcase. Profiles; mission reports. The write-up for Guille’s commendation.

Something twisted in Guille’s chest and a pang of that old shame writhed after it. Javi looked at him sidelong.

“You’ve made quite an impression over your careers,” said the suit, tapping papers in order. “Four years in the forces; three as private contractors. Three in here, taking all the garbage that management can devise to break you. All without cracking. All while maintaining a, frankly, admirable reputation for professionalism and moral conduct. Right up until that last stumbling block.”

“That was a doozy,” Javi agreed lazily. “¿So?”

“So,” echoed the suit, “it is the opinion of various specialists that you’ve made it so far because of your… unique bond.”

“Two pilots,” said Guille.

Javi squinted at him. “What?”

“The Jaeger program calls for individuals capable of working as a single unit which—”

“The brass want to weaponise our hive-mind,” Guille said shortly, cutting over the suit.

The suit seemed to feel cheated. Tugging his cuffs straight, he cleared away all the papers but two: plastic-bound and official. Above each, he laid a shiny black pen.

“Here’s the deal: sign up for candidature. Go to the Academy. Train. Fight. Survive the war that’s coming—and when it’s over, you walk away. Free men. Clean slate. We’ll even throw in a Thank You package to get you started on whatever new venture takes your fancy.” He raised a finger. “Nothing illegal, obviously.”

Javi and Guille looked at each other. Guille thought he could smell the blood coming through the suit’s breath now, sweet and salty.

Guille saw distantly where this was all going—how it would end.

“No more prison,” the suit wheedled. “No more cells.”

No more One Hour in the exercise yard, mushy corn on Wednesdays, or attending chapel just to get an hour together.

\- -

Nora met them at the airport. The PPDC troopers into whose care they had been transferred didn’t know or care enough to stop her approaching once they’d established who she was. A civilian PPDC badge went some way to easing her path.

She hugged them fiercely with an arm around each of their necks.

“Hey,” she said when she pulled away, and slapping Javi’s shoulder, “you better call my cousin while you’re away up there. ¡I know you have phone privileges now!”

He grinned. “Maybe I’ll just call you.”

“Maybe I’ll hunt you down on a Battle Alpaca if you don’t.”

“¿I thought you worked with whales now?”

At that, Nora grinned. “Among other things. ¿You prefer a killer whale? You’re going to an island with cold water. They like that sort of place. ¡And you!” She turned her fierce brown eyes on Guille.

For a moment he was half-afraid she would mention engagement again. She wore no ring, but her hug hadn’t held any more warmth than a good friend’s.

“My hand hurts from writing all those letters,” she said. “You write me some.”

“¿Are you coming with us?” Javi asked, seeing the boarding pass in her pocket.

“No, sorry, ¡tío! I’m off to the Philippines. There’s some really strange things happening out there with the sea life. I was actually in the lab today analysing samples of weed contaminated with kaiju blue, but we think the situation on the islands is more complex than we know.”

“Take care of yourself out there,” Guille said suddenly. Guiltily, he realised it was the first thing he actually said to her in four years.

She gave him a long, unreadable look before she smiled. “I will. You boys too.”

She had to run for her flight. Before she went, she leaned up to kiss them each on the cheeks. She smelled the way he remembered, but now also of brine and something acrid.

\- -

At the Academy, they sat next to Australian twins with accents like syrup, and learned the shape of the Apocalypse. They’d been released under their own recognisance to the security of PPDC Troopers and the hundreds of miles of icy water that surrounded Kodiak Island. It never crossed their minds in earnest to run away, but if they were understanding the rapid English lectures correctly, the world was fucked anyway. There was nowhere to run.

And it _was_ their world now. The bubble had burst and they were out in the thick of it up to their necks. It was in their best interests to protect it.

They studied anatomy and electronics and the civility of talking to politicians without calling them what they really were.

The wiring diagrams were outlined in brown. Javi highlighted them in orange. It was strange insight into a part of him Guille had never seen: what must he have been like in school? Paper tabs marked up all the books he’d stacked on their desk—pink and yellow and fluorescent green.

Guille’s head hurt when they finally gave up for the day and took their weary skulls outside to spread the pain to the rest of their bodies. Javi sang as they ran.

\- - 

The Australian twins taught them an American song about a man who died in France fighting the Germans. That was funny until it was the tempo that got them through thirty laps walking an Olympic swimming pool wearing twenty kilograms of mesh and metal.

The next time the twins chanted, Guille paid attention.

\- -

There was going to be a press conference. México had her first Jaeger—all locally funded and piloted by homegrown… well, not heroes. What were they?

“Meat corks,” said Javi.

“Thank you for that disgusting image,” said Guille absently, brushing it away from his mind the way he’d cleaned cobwebs from his cell. The two of them sat side by side on a bench in their drivesuits (orange and grey; Kevlar, polymer, latex, and fine brassy wires).

“¿Dogs in space?” Javi offered.

Beyond their little antechamber waited the lights and flashes of a hundred photographers, video-cameras, and journalists all panting to meet the next Jaeger into the fray. In his mind’s eye, Guille could already see the Hermanos stepping into the explosion—when the doors opened there would be a burst of light and a wave of sound. He could see them free-falling into white-sparked black.

“I heard the Russians sent that poor thing up there without any real plan how to get it down again,” said Javi reflectively. He was playing with the bolt of his wrist cuff. He squinted sideways. “That’s us, if you missed it. We’re the dogs about to be jet-packed into the Great Black Oblivion.”

“Maybe it was the dog’s destiny,” said Guille. “The road to progress is always paved with bodies. ¿Why should the space race be different? Maybe it was fate.”

“Ain’t fate to be microwaved like a frozen burrito, bajito. Every minute we spend in that metal monster, they’re nuking our innards. Man, I wanted babies someday. But after this… I don’t know if I’d be willing to inflict that on some poor girl, ¿you know?”

A young woman wielding a headset and a clipboard pushed open the anteroom door and gestured at them.

Guille stood and heard all his Kevlar/polymer/latex creak. “Maybe that’s our fate.”

His co-pilot fell into step behind him. “Oh well. At least we’re gonna to look cool on world TV.”

\- -

When they got back to quarters, there was a message from Nora. She’d seen the first news coverage. Los Hermanos Matadores in the Mark-III Matador Fury. Not their first choice of name.

She’d left a message that was just cackling for five minutes straight.

A few minutes later she’d left another, more normal, message. “Of course they called it that. It was always going to be that. Congratulations.”

\- -

Several months later, the men stood by a vast window in dark suits pinned with the PPDC star and bird, and this time Guille allowed himself to ponder that this was not at all where he had meant for life to bring him.

Javi nudged him. “¡Wipe the sad off your face, hermano! The Corps is bankrolling this glorious party, and you’re scaring away the fishes.” He lifted his champagne to a passing pair of women in floor-length gowns. “This is why Nora doesn’t want to date you anymore.”

“Nora’s happy on the other side of the Pacific. And she deserves better.”

“Absolutely true, and also the reason I didn’t invite her to tonight’s soiree.”

Guille looked at him sidelong. “She’s busy. She wouldn’t have come.”

“She might have. But anyway, that’s the past. ¡We’re living in the present! And in the present, the ladies here would be jumping into our laps like salmon if you weren’t wearing a death-mask.”

“I was just thinking that you were right,” Guille said, tilting his own flute to see the bubbles.

“Of course I was. About what?” His co-pilot wasn’t even really listening. His mind where it touched Guille’s was wholly consumed by the tailoring of Marshal Bei’s dress.

“We’re the dog in space.”

“Watching the world drift by far beyond our earthly reach, never to return again,” Javi sighed. Gripping Guille’s shoulder, he shook it and grinned fiercely. “But isn’t the view great?”

He downed the rest of his champagne and went to get more. Guille turned his back on the room and looked out the window. In the distance, fireworks were going off over Panama City to celebrate the opening of her Shatterdome.

\- -

One of Guille's cousins was invited to perform in the fiesta de San Fermín in Spain. The Rangers had to beg off three days to attend, but it was good P.R. and their roster was covered by the other Jaeger that had joined Panama's roster.

His cousin had the blood, Guille reflected from the stands. More than Guille ever would have, and definitely more than his father ever did. He applauded every victory over a bull and tried not to think about paths not taken. He would never have made it so far.

Afterward, he and Javi stood bracketing his cousin for photos, the young man in his matador costume and the Rangers in their glittering team jackets inspired by the same. Los matadores de verdad.

\- -

Nora brought her new boyfriend home to México to meet her family. Guille wasn’t sure how that justified swinging down the coast to Panama but a tour of the new Shatterdome from México’s golden sons might have played into it. The boyfriend shook Guille’s hand and then Javi’s very enthusiastically.

Guille didn’t know if Nora had told Ned that this Ranger was the ex-boyfriend she used to live with. It didn’t seem to matter. Ned was a local boy, Filipino, and nothing mattered to him more than preserving the waters around his island—except doing so with Nora. He seemed overall open, honest, and decent. Not much of a sense of humour, but you couldn’t have everything. Nora seemed happy.

So Guille smiled when Javi did, and made all the right gestures. He was the first to offer Ned a beer when they finally all sat down in the cafeteria.

“_Oh—thanks, man! I don’t drink, but cold water would be great._”

Guille drifted away to get a tray. When he came back, Javi was explaining his tattoos to Ned, who was puzzled by Javi stabbing his religion into his skin. While they talked, Guille looked at Nora. She was smiling at her boyfriend’s nonplussed faces with her elbows on the table, unconsciously thumbing a small cross tattoo on her own wrist.

He didn’t remember her as particularly religious. Javi’s conviction infected them all eventually, he supposed. Ironically, it looked very similar to the cross Guille had tattooed on his own back with her name around it.

He couldn’t remember if she’d had it that day at the airport or not.

\- -

Shortly after, Nora sent them an email with a photo attached: herself, Ned, and a small international crew on the foredeck of their research vessel. They’d won the grant to continue their project.

Javi wrote up a quick congratulations, snapped a reaction photo of himself and his co-pilot looking surprised and pleased, and shot the whole lot back to her before Guille could overthink it.

While Javi went back to typing up a maintenance request for a glitch in their eject protocol, Guille studied the photo. She was browner than he remembered, even surrounded by Filipinos and the other Mexicans on her crew. '¿Guess who’s lead technician now?', she’d written in the email.

Guille had begun to think of her the way Javi did: vivid, cheerful, and wasted on Guille.

“Wasn’t meant to be, hermano,” said Javi. He slapped Guille on the back and went to talk to J-Tech.

\- -

So they generally didn’t get more than an hour of sunlight a day, between training and the general lack of windows in the Shatterdome. They rarely wore clothes that weren’t PPDC-blue jumpsuits. They never ate a meal that someone else hadn’t cooked.

But they were walking free. And they still had that second heartbeat keeping time with their own.

\- -

In December of 2019, a kaiju took out what was left of Manila. Nora and her crew were offshore trying to get data as close to its arrival as possible.

At the funeral outside the D.F., Guille and Javi shook hands with the Rangers who eventually took the kaiju down – more Australians and a Chinese couple – and then with mourning family. It wasn’t Nora they were putting in the ground, but barely. They’d seen her in Manila jammed full of tubes in an ICU.

It still felt like they were burying her. Guille glanced at the portraits of her deceased mexicano crew and tried not to imagine her among them. Ned’s funeral had been two days earlier in Dagupan.

It was funny: there were people in attendance that Guille hadn’t seen since they buried Chamorro. Some of them shook hands with Javi and Guille as México’s prize _Jaeger Rangers_ and thought that the men attended in an official capacity. If they recognised either from the first funeral, or as Nora’s former lover and friend, they didn’t show it.

After the funeral, Javi and Guille got a beer. The place looked a lot like the cantina where Nora first found Guille, although that was on the other side of the D.F. and it had closed for health code violations. Whatever seemed like it stayed the same was an illusion. History didn’t repeat, it just ran off the same blueprint.

A compound, a barracks, a cell, a cantina, a Conn-Pod. The world expanded; the world contracted; but ultimately, their only constants were each other.

“You remember,” said Javi, “¿once I told Nora you never do anything without three years to think and bombs going off around you?”

“I remember.” He’d thought about it a lot in prison.

Javi tapped ash off his cigarette. He wasn’t supposed to smoke while contracted as a Ranger, but fuck it. It was what you did when a friend died. “Well, hermano, it’s been three years since we signed on. Manila’s in flames. ¿Any second thoughts?”

Jokes aside, he had thought about it. “No,” he said and took a deep draught of his beer. They’d always been bound to end up here.

He tapped the bar for another round and, when they came, lifted his to salute. “To Ned. To the crew of _Malalim Na Asul_. They made their choices, just like us all.”

“Ned and choices. _Amen_.” Javi clinked his bottle to Guille’s.

\- -

Jumphawks sent out phosphor flares to illuminate the battlefield. Through these, searchlights painted white stripes across the city and the kaiju.

They’d fought hard. Help was coming but not fast enough. Matador Fury staggered, battle-torn and punctured. Through the flashing red HUD alerts, they looked across the Conn at each other. Blood ran across Javi’s nose.

Darkly, his eyes reflected the brilliance of the HUD. The blue glow of the kaiju’s mouth as it ran toward them. The distant white streaks of phosphor.

Guille grinned at him and tasted copper and spice, and ozone as the Pons faltered. He kept grinning as the words of Ave María came to mind.

The Jaeger tilted. Power flickered. The countdown flashed orange across both of them. Minutes now. They never did get around to fixing that chronic fault in the eject system.

But they were always going to rise and fall together.

The kaiju roared, almost upon them, rattling buildings with its bounding leaps. The Jaeger toppled. Mechanical pops and groans deafened them. They collapsed backward on a multistorey parking lot, which sagged and then steadied. The countdown ticked back to seconds. This battle was almost over.

They’d wanted to take it out of the city, but there’d been no time. This was a Category 4 kaiju and no one had been prepared for it. At least they could take it with them.

There was no need to reach for the self-destruct. Eject might be busted, but the destruct worked fine. Guille reached for Javi’s hand instead. His co-pilot grabbed it.

Sparks flew around them as the kaiju landed four paws on their chest. Yowling, it clawed their breastplate open. They spasmed with the feedback zinging through their drivesuits. Javi’s eyes were so, so bright.

With a last surge of effort, they heaved their free arms up and locked them around the kaiju. It stood no chance.

Heat flushed through the Jaeger as they lay at the heart of a detonating bomb.

Perhaps he should have married Nora.

The building collapsed under them and they fell.


End file.
